


The Candle Burned Out Long Before the Legend of it Did

by GoldStarGrl



Category: Superstore (TV)
Genre: Angst, Bisexuality, Gambling, Gen, Origin Story, Panic Attacks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-26
Updated: 2016-11-26
Packaged: 2018-09-02 07:57:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8658811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldStarGrl/pseuds/GoldStarGrl
Summary: Business school isn't the only thing Jonah's running from.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, I'm GoldStarGrl and I'm apparently incapable of watching any half-hour comedy without imagining a character mentally ill, queer, and in pain. Enjoy.

He's the baby of the Simms family, the third and final son of a woman who desperately wanted a daughter. Jonah knew this almost as soon as he was capable of conscious thought. His mother faintly protested the few times this was acknowledged - “I love all my sons equally!” she would say, vaguely waving the martini glass pinched by the stem between her fingers - but everyone knew it was a farce.

His parents hadn't even picked out for a name him when he was born - Ezra and Henry already claimed the both of their grandfathers’, and Mother and Father were so, so sure he was going to be a girl. Henry told him he spent the first three days of his life as Baby Boy Simms, until a nurse came in and told the family they couldn’t take him home until they filled out a birth certificate.

He sometimes wonders if they just opened the Big Book of Biblical Baby Names and pointed at Jonah at random. If they saw the irony of their choice, now.

* * *

He's a smart kid. He can read by age four and spends most afternoons at the dining room table buried in a book, hoping the rest of his family will take notice of how hefty and impressive the titles are.

He's smart, but Henry and Ezra are smarter. Henry can play basketball and gets a varsity letter when he's only a freshman, and the only reason Jonah gets into the school's honor society is because Ezra makes a call to the teacher in charge.

"Come on, Mr. Wallace." He hears, hushed through their shared bedroom wall one night before the start of tenth grade. "He's my little brother."

He gets a 3.8 GPA and runs the high school's literary magazine for three years and makes himself sick, literally shaking and nauseous and dizzy, getting into U of Chicago. He becomes the darling of the Creative Writing program, lands an internship with Simon & Schuster his senior year, gets introduced to Dave Eggers when a girl he’s dating mentions she’s his assistant and he doesn’t even embarrass himself.

He graduates with high honors and a headful of New Yorker articles and novel ideas, and his father just shakes his hand after the ceremony and mutters to his brothers - “What kind of job does he think he’s getting with that?” when he _knows_ Jonah can still hear him.

No matter what he does, how hard he tries, Henry and Ezra have done it first, and they did it better.

So he goes in the other direction. Starts to play poker and backgammon online, his losses and the debt he owes getting more and more extravagant and attention seeking, and still - nothing. His family just _tsks_ at their stupid little brother and pay off all his gambles without meeting his eye or mentioning it ever again.

When he was twelve he developed the habit of scratching at the skin behind his ears when stressed out or agitated, without even realizing he was doing it. In sixth grade Julienne McPherson shuddered and informed him in front of the entire math class that he was bleeding, that he picked the softest skin on his body red and raw until it couldn’t take it anymore.

At twenty-three he picks it back up again.

* * *

At Henry's wedding, he drinks a little too much champagne and tries to speak Spanish with one of the caterers, who it turns out isn't actually Latina and shoves his next drink into his palm with a little too much force. During the bouquet toss he gets an email alert informing him _The Atlantic_ and _McSweeney's_ rejected the short story he submitted to them.

At Ezra’s baby girl’s _Simbat chat_ a month later, he can’t stop digging the dirt out from under his nails and thinking about when Father was his age he already had a thriving business, how he clapped Ezra on the back when he got his MFA and took roughly five million pictures of Ezra when he joined the firm as a junior wealth management executive, whatever the hell that meant.

At his parents’ thirtieth wedding anniversary party, he slips out two hours early, dizzy with booze leaking through his pores, and stays up all night filling out applications for grad schools and business schools and even a few med schools, just to do something with his hands, with his mind. Just to do something.

* * *

He moves from the North Side for a few months, feeding the family vague excuses of finding an apartment closer to his classes, but he really just wants to get away from his parents and their friends who click their tongues and offer his father a sympathetic shoulder touch. _Jonah’s still hanging around the house. Jonah’s still a spacey dreamer who we suspect is smoking pot. Jonah’s still a screw-up._

He pulls all-nighter after all-nighter, studying until his hands shake and his visions tunnels down to a pinprick of light. More than once he doesn’t fall asleep so much as pass out on the carpet next to his desk. He eats too many corn chips and only hydrates on Red Bull and Monster. The only time he leaves his apartment is for class and to stagger to the bar down the street to see if human contact will somehow right him, calm his frazzled nerves.

At twenty-eight, he sleeps with a guy for the first time. For a good three weeks afterwards, he wakes up feeling Rob's hands, cold on his hips, sliding down his thighs. The clammy feeling wasn't unpleasant, Jonah always ran hot after sex. Hot and quiet, because if he started talking he might work himself into a panic.

He was only just starting to learn that _everything_ works him into a panic.

He stops backing up his stories on his flash drive, even if he can't bring himself to outright delete them. Let some rogue virus burn it all down. Let someone else decide his life for him. 

* * *

The scariest thing about it is he doesn’t even realize he’s driving until a good ten minutes into the trip.

He starts, like he’s coming out of a bad dream, and realizes he’s in the front seat of his car, a car that’s been repeatedly vandalized and had it’s hubcaps ripped off because he and his Camry don’t belong in the South Side anymore then he did on the other side of the city. And he’s pulling onto the interstate, sweating through his jeans and the cotton of his shirt sticking to his skin between his shoulder blades.

He could have _killed_ someone. He could’ve killed _himself_.

For a second, just a moment, he almost relaxes his fingers, lets the friction and wind and gravity steer him towards - into - whatever or whoever fate desired.

Just for a second. And then oxygen fills his lungs, expands in his blood cells, and he keeps breathing.

He readjusts his grip on the wheel and straightens his spine. Tries to smile at the road again. He’s not a quitter. He’s not going to quit when this drive has clearly just started.


End file.
